Pictures to Follow...

Ok. I have learned my lesson. At the beginning-ish of the month, my sister-in-law, Jamie, decided to make some quilts for her kids. At the time, I thought, "haha". Not because I doubt Jamie's amazing crafting skills, but because I know how much work and time and effort and the occasional swear word goes into a quilt. The next day, my mother calls me and says, "by the way, with this stuff I'm sending, I'm also going to send the jeans. I would like you to make a jean quilt out of them. The box weighs fifty pounds."

HOLY CARP! I think to myself. D'oh! You see, for Christmas, I got a new sewing machine, which is way awesome and I love. So I agreed to do it.

I did some quilting research, since I've never actually pieced a quilt, just found cute fabric and tied it (and bound it, so I have experience with the binding aspect). When I got the jeans, I looked at them and thought, there is no way these jeans will make one quilt. I looked at a few more tutorials on YouTube (where would I be with out that informational gem?) and found a tutorial for paper piecing. It looked super easy and I found a really simple pattern for a block and made myself a pattern for a 84" X 84" quilt. It requires 19 dark 7" blocks, 20 light 7" blocks, and 10 pieced 7" blocks.
Now, it took me two days to cut up the jeans with the help of my friend, Hannah. Then I took a break from the jeans while my knuckles recovered from the cutting. On Monday night, I ironed all the pieces and started the preliminary measuring, seeing how many jeans it was really going to take. The answer: 8 pairs. Seriously. 8 Pairs. So, not only am I going to be able to make this one huge quilt for my Mom and Dad, but I'll be able to make quilts about the same size for myself and both of my brothers. Awesome. All that designing for nothing.

Anyway, last night (Tuesday), I got all the blocks cut out and (after several practice attempts) got three of the paper pieced blocks done. This quilt is coming together faster than I thought. And, with the paper piecing, the paper has to be torn off, but its kinda fun because the small stitch length perforates the paper pretty well, and Justin likes to pull the paper off, so he can say that he "helped" with the quilts. It actually is a big help to me. I'm so lucky to have him!

I will post pictures. I was going to take them and post them today, but I was running late out of the house, so I'll take pictures tonight and post them tomorrow.